Bridges over Troubled Water: A Comparative Study of Jews, Arabs, and Palestinians (review)

Bridges over Troubled Water seeks to explain the construction of social identities and political attitudes in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The findings presented in the book are based on quantitative analysis of two surveys held among Israeli and Palestinian high school students and adults. The questionnaires were designed to probe correlations between the relative importance of each social identity of the respondents (national identity, civic identity, occupation, family, gender, locality, political attitude, ethnic identity and religiosity) and various variables such as demographic attributes, political attitudes, intolerance of others, materialistic/post-materialistic orientations and willingness to assume social responsibility. The study deals with three major groups: Jewish citizens of Israel (defined as Jews), Arab Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (defined as Palestinians), and Arab citizens of Israel (defined as Arabs).

Moore and Aweiss, an Israeli and a Palestinian, present a careful statistical analysis that reveals some interesting findings with potentially far-reaching implications about the dynamics of this conflict. Despite its promise, however, the terminological and conceptual incoherencies and inaccuracies significantly detract from the book's quality. The main problem is the way the terms "national" and "civic" identity are used in the Israeli-Palestinian context. My concern here is much more than semantic, because based on their findings, the authors aspire to build sophisticated theoretical models that refer to broader contexts. The conceptual inadequacy impairs both the dialogue with other contexts as well as the comparison between the various groups in the study.

In the questionnaires used for Israeli citizens, "Israeli" is considered their "civic identity," while their national identity is either Jewish or Arab. These definitions reflect an uncritical adoption of the terms used by the official Israeli population registry. The question of whether or not "Israeli" refers to national identity is highly contested, and the simplistic and essentialist labeling in this book does not do justice to the complexity of the issue. The questionnaires presented to the Arab citizens of Israel were even more problematic. Numerous quantitative studies have shown that Palestinian identity is a significant element in the collective identity of Arab citizens of Israel, and it is reasonable to assume that many of them would have defined their national identity as such had they been asked. In light of these studies, the fact that "Palestinian identity" was not even offered as an option for the Arab citizens of Israel is puzzling. Furthermore, it significantly limits the conclusions we can draw from this study.

The above-mentioned last point is related to the generally ahistorical treatment of Palestinian identity in the book. Surprisingly enough, it is treated primarily as a byproduct of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994 and therefore it is classified as a civic identity for the Palestinians who live in the occupied territories, while it is non-existent for the Arabs in Israel. It is very difficult to defend this approach; although scholars of Palestinian identity disagree about the date of its inception, there is a unanimous consensus that its roots are significantly deeper than the creation of the PA. Furthermore, the term Palestinian evokes a wide spectrum of collective memories and connotations far beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the young and shaky PA.

In addition, the book suffers from some puzzling methodological decisions which hinder the comparative perspective. For example, the authors omitted the crucial religiosity variable from the questionnaire distributed to the Arab adult sample, ignoring the variations in level of religiosity among Arabs (even when the vast majority defines itself as religious) and their political significance.

It is also difficult to draw conclusions about mutual perceptions of Jewish Israelis and Arab Palestinians because both sides were asked to scale their level of sympathy toward different groups in Israeli society alone. Although I was very interested to learn that both Arabs in Israel and Palestinians in the occupied territories distinguish between different parts of...